Mayank's Blog

Covid-19 has been declared a pandemic by WHO. Countries around the world are working to contain and treat Coronavirus affected patients. People are asked to avoid congregating in large numbers and work from home if possible. There are multiple precautions suggested by WHO such as washing hands, avoid touching your face, etc. However as we increasingly work in isolation, it is easy to forget these instructions. As a software developer, I mostly spend my day working on the freshly baked Windows Terminal . It is an amazing piece of software that you can customize to your heart's content. Scott Hanselman has done an amazing series of blog posts around that. Now what if I can get Windows Terminal to prompt me and tell me about the precautions that I need to take! To get this working on your machine, 1. you need to follow the instructions in Scott Hanselman's blog post first. 2. Next customize the theme for your terminal as provided in this gist. This theme cycles thro...

We are living in a micro services world. All these services are generally hosted in Docker container which are ephemeral. Moreover these service need to start themselves up, talk to each other, etc. All this needs configuration and there are many commercially available configuration providers like Spring Cloud Config Server, Consul etc. These are excellent tools which provide a lot more functionality than just storing configuration data. However all these have a weakness - they have a single point of failure - their storage mechanism be it a file system, database etc. There are ways to work around those but if you want a really simple place to store configuration values and at the same time make it highly available, with guaranteed global availability and millisecond reads, what can be a better tool than Azure Cosmos DB! So I set forth on this journey for ASP.NET Core projects to talk to Cosmos DB to retrieve their configuration data. For inspiration I looked at Steeltoe Con...

Kinect is an amazing piece of technology. Not only for gaming, it can be used for variety of uses ranging from Healthcare, Security, IT etc. Starting with coding for Kinect seems daunting at first, mainly due to lack of knowledge and starting material. This article documents my first attempt at coding for Kinect. So basically it’s a beginner level article which introduces us to Kinect. Before you begin, you must ensure that the following pre-requisites have been met. Kinect for Xbox 360 – You should have the retail version of Kinect hardware. Kinect for Windows SDK should be installed on your system. Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit should be installed on your system. After you install the Kinect for Windows SDK, plug-in your Kinect to your PC via the USB port and some device drivers should automatically get installed. Finally you should be able to see this screen. Now that you have all set up, fire up Visual Studio and create a new WPF project. Add a ...

(GEEK ALERT : This post is for those who are interested in Microsoft Technologies, especially Silverlight). A while ago I thought of developing my own Twitter client just for fun. And what better way to write it in than Silverlight. Because of the cross-domain policy restriction in Silverlight, I had to write a WCF service which carried the tweets payload. I decided to call this app  TweetAwesome - a homage to my awesomeness and humility. :) TweetAwesome uses TwitterVB as its Twitter API library and wears the Metro Theme for Silverlight . The application is also styled using Expression Blend (although I still don't fully know how to use it). As I don't have the infrastructure/money/time to host a WCF service, this app is just for enthusiasts. Here are some snapshots (sneak preview) of the application. (Click on the pictures to launch a full screen slideshow) . 1. When TweetAwesome is used for the first time, the user is asked to allow TweetAwesome to access Twitter on...

As the year 2009 draws to a close, let us take a look back at a product which Microsoft launched ealier this year as its answer to Wordpress - Oxite . Oxite is an is an " open source, standards compliant, and extensible content management sample that can run anything from blogs to big web sites ." This is how Microsoft describes it. (To see Oxite in action, click here )